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Quality Assurance (QA)

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

One reason xTuple ERP is such a reliable business solution is that, for every release, we submit the application to a rigorous Quality Assurance (QA) process. Using a combination of automated test scripts, more detailed manual use cases, and feedback from community beta testers, the QA team provides our developers with valuable feedback throughout the software release cycle. This page is designed to familiarize people with our testing methods — and, hopefully, to inspire even more community members to be involved with testing and providing feedback on our products. Community involvement is critical to the continued success and improvement of xTuple ERP. As Eric Raymond wrote in The Cathedral and the Bazaar years ago, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

Use Cases

Our use case testing starts at the most basic level — populating an empty database — and moves all the way through the most advanced functionality available in xTuple ERP. To see more details on our use cases, click on any of the following links. This information, maintained in Google Docs spreadsheets, is continuously updated in real time:

Automated Testing

Our automated test scripts are written using Squish, a tool designed specifically for testing cross-platform applications (such as xTuple ERP) which are built using Qt. With this approach, we can write one test script, then run it against all of our supported clients and all of the xTuple ERP Editions. The videos provided below are samples from our growing set of automated test suites.

Anyone who has a licensed copy of Squish may run our test scripts themselves. We maintain the scripts in a GitHub repository.

Process Overview

The QA team follows a standard schedule during the software release cycle to ensure consistent results are achieved. As a general rule, automated tests are executed first, followed by manual testing of the remaining use cases.

At present, the majority of our tests are performed manually — against the Manufacturing Edition on both Windows and Mac. However, we are working to automate as many of our use cases as possible. xTuple is committed to automated testing — and to the fully cross-platform, cross-edition coverage it affords.